The sorrow on her face made me feel awful. But a made-up nightmare was a better explanation than, Got accosted by an evil psychopomp, then went to visit an old serial killer’s house. Oh, and hooked up.
“Lizzie, I’m so sorry. Do you need to talk about your dream?”
I shook my head. “No big deal, no airports or terrorists. It was just . . . my feet were stuck in this black goo. I was sinking.”
“That sounds awful, kiddo.”
“Sorry I woke you up.” I crawled from the closet and stood.
My mother managed a smile, and rose from the bed to give me a long hug. When we parted, she looked down at my makeshift nest on the floor.
“It’s funny,” she said. “You used to be afraid of closets when you were little. But the house where I grew up had these huge walk-ins. I used to do sleepovers in there with . . .”
I waited for more, but Mom was still staring. She knelt and lifted something from the closet floor. It flashed in her hand—the kitchen knife I’d taken with me to the afterworld. It must have fallen from my pocket when I pulled off my jeans.
I tried to smile. “Oh, yeah. I was kind of scared.”
The look on her face was so sad.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I know it seems weird.”
She held the knife carefully with both hands. “I know what it’s like to be scared all the time. After my friend disappeared, I was like that for months. You’ll do anything to make yourself feel safer.”
I nodded, an image of all those little girls flooding back into my head, and I knew for certain that, in a way, my mother understood. And I also knew that I would be going back to Palo Alto, to make sure that the bad man never hurt anyone again.
CHAPTER 19
HER FAVORITE PART OF SETTING fires had always been the matches. She liked the way they rattled, stiff little wooden soldiers in a cardboard box, and the way they bloomed into hot flowers between cupped palms. She loved the ripping, fluttering noises they made as they fought the wind. Even their remains were beautiful—spindly, black, and bowed—after they’d burned all the way down to fire-calloused fingertips.
Ariel Flint never went to school without them.
She was early today, so she headed for the smokers’ den, a hidden corner of the school grounds formed by two temps wedged against the backside of the gym. The temporary buildings had been classrooms years ago. Through their cloudy windows, you could still see blackboards on the walls. Now they were storage for the theater department, stuffed with old sets and props, racks of costumes with the tattered look of moth food. The temps were always locked, but they stood on cinder blocks and you could crawl away beneath them in a pinch.
This morning’s pinch was already under way when Ariel came around the back of the gym. Peterson, the school’s rent-a-cop, was on one knee in the corner, peering into the shadows beneath the temps. He was calling threats after some escaping student, the radio in his hand sputtering and angry.
Ariel spun around on one heel, ducking her head. Once a month or so Peterson busted the smokers’ den, rounding up everyone for detentions and “community service,” which meant slopping out food in the cafeteria. The thought of wearing a hairnet for a week of lunches sent Ariel into a run, heading toward the gymnasium’s rear doors.
A moment later she burst onto the basketball court. The doors slammed behind her, filling the empty gym with echoes—booms mixing with the squeak of her boots on the pine floor. She froze for a moment, breathing hard and coming up with excuses, but Peterson hadn’t followed her.
Ariel smiled and spun once at center court, miming a shot at the basket to the applause of an invisible crowd. Capture evaded!
The year before, she’d written a paper on gambling for psychology, about an experiment with caged pigeons who fed themselves by pulling a lever. If the lever always produced a single food pellet, the pigeons pulled it only when they were hungry. If the device stopped giving them food at all, the pigeons soon gave up on it. But when the lever worked like a slot machine, sometimes giving nothing, other times paying off big, the pigeons got addicted. Even when they already had plenty of food, they wanted to see what would happen with the next pull.
Pigeons, like people, loved to gamble.
While writing this paper, Ariel had realized that getting caught in the smokers’ den worked the same way. Had Peterson shown up every day, everyone would’ve found another place to smoke, or maybe quit altogether. And if no one ever tried to bust them, smoking wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun. But Peterson came along just often enough to keep things interesting.
Of course, the smokers at Reagan High were addicted to nicotine, not gambling, and would’ve been fine with being left alone. But Ariel had never been a smoker. She was there to light other people’s cigarettes, to watch the smoke curl from their mouths, to glory in fiery tips flaring with every drawn breath. For her, the chance of getting caught was part of the thrill of starting fires, large or small.
“What the hell, Flint?” boomed a voice from across the gym.
Ariel turned from the empty bleachers, and found a pissed-off Erin Dale striding toward her.
“Um,” Ariel said. “Just made the winning shot.”
Coach Dale came to a halt a few yards away, crossing her arms. She wore her usual uniform, a tight sleeveless T-shirt and sweatpants, her hair tied in a long ponytail. On her left shoulder, three red claws extended out two inches from beneath the shirt. No one had ever seen the rest of the tattoo, but Ariel was somehow certain that it was a dragon curled between the coach’s br**sts.
“It’s nice to see you take an interest in sports, Miss Flint. But you’re wearing Doc Martens on my pinewood.”
“Oh, right.” Ariel looked down and saw a spiral of tiny black marks around her feet. “Whoa. Sorry.”
Coach Dale regarded Ariel coolly. In gym class, Ariel only ever worked at running, jumping, and climbing—useful skills for getting away—and was hopeless at anything involving a ball or a score. But she had an old and smoldering crush on Coach Dale, and wouldn’t have dreamed of smudging her basketball court.
In a show of contrition, Ariel lifted one offending boot from the floor and balanced there, untying its laces. Wobbling only a little, she wrangled it off, then did the same with the other.
“Good coordination and flexibility,” Coach Dale said. “Wish we saw more of that from you in class.”
Ariel didn’t answer. The gym floor was cold beneath her stocking feet, and she felt small and penitent under the coach’s gaze.
One of the rear doors swung open. It was Peterson, radio still in hand.
“Hey, Coach,” he said, his eyes on Ariel. “Anyone come through here?”
Coach Dale’s pissed-off expression didn’t change. “Not that I’ve seen. Have you seen anyone, Miss Flint?”
Ariel shook her head.
Peterson didn’t look like he bought it, but he flashed the coach a salute and went back through the gym doors to resume his hunt outside.
After another moment of silence, the coach uncrossed her arms. “It’s pointless telling you how bad smoking is for your lungs and stamina. But you know it makes your lips thinner, right?”
“And gives you yellow teeth, puffy skin, and wrinkles around the eyes,” Ariel recited. “That’s why I don’t smoke.”
Coach narrowed her eyes and came closer, until they were face-to-face. Ariel tried to keep from staring at the red claws sneaking out from beneath the T-shirt.
The woman sniffed. “Is that smoke I smell?”
“Yeah, but it’s not cigarette smoke. I built a fire this morning . . . to warm up.”
The coach raised an eyebrow. But Ariel wasn’t lying, and cigarette smoke didn’t smell at all like an honest fire.
It had only been a small one. Ariel had indulged on the way to school, in an already burned-out oil barrel behind the Shop ’n’ Save. Someone had left a bundle of three-foot cardboard tubes in a Dumpster, impossible to ignore. She’d arranged them into a pyramid balanced on the rim of the barrel, and it had taken only a few minutes before the burning structure had crumbled, spitting a galaxy of sparks into the air.
“Whatever you say, Flint. Follow me.”
Ariel trailed her toward the girls’ locker room, boots in hand.
The locker room smelled as it always did, like old sweat and cheap soap. Coach Dale opened the door to the Cage, which was what everyone called her office with its walls of metal grating. She slid open her desk and pulled out an eraser the size of a cigarette lighter, pink and new.
She tossed it to Ariel, who caught it with her free hand.
“That should do the trick. Use spit if you need to.”
Ariel stared at the eraser for a moment, and Coach Dale sighed and reached across the desk. She plucked the boots from Ariel’s hand, slid open a file drawer, and dropped them in. She shut the drawer and turned its lock.
“You get those back when I can’t find a single mark on my court.”
“Okay, but—” The blare of the first bell cut Ariel off.
Coach Dale sank into her desk chair, picked up a clipboard and pen, and kicked up her feet. “Fifteen minutes till first period. Better get erasing, Flint. Just remember to rub with the grain of the wood.”
Ariel started to protest again, but tasted defeat before the words left her mouth. She sighed, turned, and walked out of the Cage, through the locker room, and back to the court. Her heart was no longer racing from her escape from Peterson, nor with the dying dregs of her crush on Coach Dale.
This sucked.
She knelt at center court, counting black smudges until her tally reached twenty. She rubbed at the smallest mark with the eraser, spitting on it once or twice, until it had completely disappeared.
Then Ariel looked up at the big sweep-hand clock over the door. Twelve minutes left till homeroom, more than nineteen marks to go. She doubted Coach Dale would be writing her a late pass.
That was the hitch with getting caught. One infraction led to another until you were certified a bad kid, unsalvageable. But all Ariel could do was keep erasing little black marks and ignoring how cold her feet were.
She was less than halfway done when the first-period late-bell rang. A moment later a crowd of girls surged from the locker rooms, already suited up in field hockey uniforms.
Coach Dale followed them out, yelling, “Four laps, ladies! No cutting corners!”
Ariel made the mistake of looking up, and caught the eyes of the first runners in the pack. She saw their expressions switch from momentary confusion to a mix of amusement and pity.
She stared at the floor again, at her pink eraser rubbing hopelessly at the black marks. Ariel was an expert at keeping her head down, but that didn’t do much good here in the middle of the gym, a score of girls running circles around her with nothing else to stare at. Her face grew as hot as her feet were cold.
“Any time now, Flint,” Coach Dale called from the sidelines. “I need my basketball court.”
“Sorry,” Ariel muttered, just to be saying something.
She heard her last name repeated by the runners, like a whisper traveling through the gym. She closed her mind to her surroundings, narrowing her focus to the black marks in front of her. . . .
Then she felt it happening—the friction kindling beneath the pink tongue of the eraser, the growing heat at her fingertips. Her awareness expanded, not outward to the titters of the girls around her, but down into the materials of the gym itself. She felt the pine under her hands and knees, sensed the oxygen trapped in the tiny spaces of the wood’s grain, the resins and oils that gave it color. Then farther out to the dry wood of the bleachers, the banners hanging from the walls. She could smell the iron oxide in the half-disintegrated eraser, and the hot filaments of the lightbulbs overhead.
The school was full of volatiles, wood and plaster, cloth and plastic, cans of paint and stacks of paper.